“I believe you can.  And do you think you could get off to go down to the store for me this evening?”

“Going down anyway for mom,” he assured her.

Sheila had a dollar and a little change besides.  She had already planned just what the dollar would buy in the way of necessaries.  There were cooking utensils in the cabin sufficient for her modest needs.  She gave little John-Ed the dollar and her list and warned him to hide her purchases safely until the next morning and bring them to her on his way to school.

“What you going to eat to-night?” he asked her bluntly.

“I dug some clams at low water and caught a big horseshoe crab.”

“Cousin Phineas brought us more squeteague than we can eat.  Mom told me to cut one up for the hens.  I’ll bring it down to you in a little.  It’s a fresh one.”

In spite of her refusal, he did this, and brought along, too, a box of sweet crackers which he had bought and hidden away in his bedroom closet in preparation for some time when he might wake up in the night and feel that he was on the verge of famine.

“Though I never did wake up in the night that I can remember, ’cept that time I had the toothache,” he observed.

And in this way Sheila began her hermit life in the fisherman’s cabin.

But Sheila was not without a practical design as to her future.  In her determination to accept no further aid from the Balls she had crippled her finances.  Back in the inland town where she had spent her girlhood, and where Dr. Macklin had served the community so long, there were those who, in disapproving Sheila’s venture into the city, at least had a sense of justice.  Some of these critical friends whom the young woman had shrunk from appealing to heretofore, still owed for Dr. Macklin’s services; and Sheila felt that in this present tragic emergency she must attempt the collection of these old debts.

She wrote letters praying that money might be sent her by express to Paulmouth, but with the orders addressed under cover to “John-Ed Williams, Jr.” at the Big Wreck Cove post office.  She explained her design to her juvenile confidant and little John-Ed was made immensely proud of such mark of her trust.  She could have found no more faithful adherent than the boy, and with him the secret of her dwelling on the lonely shore and in her hermit-like state was safe.

But her presence there could not be hidden for long; of that she was well aware.  Little John-Ed, however, told nobody of her whereabouts until the day Tunis Latham came back from Boston and learned that the girl he loved had stolen away from her home in the Ball house.

Coming out of the rear door of the barn, fresh from the interview with the old captain which had so shocked him, Tunis saw a small boy astride the low stone fence that marked the rear boundary of the Ball farm.  The captain of the Seamew was in no mood to bandy words with little John-Ed Williams, but the sharp tooth of his troubled thought fastened upon one indubitable fact:  if there is anything odd going on in a community, the small boy of that community knows all about it—­or, at least, as much about it as it is possible to know.